Current research projects

The academic staff of The School of Languages and Linguistics undertake many research projects and have been awarded many research grants. Details of current funded research can be found in this section.

Digital Daisy Bates (2013-)

Assoc. Professor Nick Thieberger

In collaboration with the National Library of Australia (NLA), this project has made accessible this extremely valuable collection of several hundred wordlists of Australian languages, originally recorded by Daisy Bates in the early 1900s. This will enable reuse of the collection by Aboriginal people searching for their own heritage languages and by other researchers.

EthnoER online presentation and annotation system (EOPAS) (2013- )

Assoc. Professor Nick Thieberger, Professor Rachel Nordlinger

EthnoER online presentation and annotation system: Preparation of an open-source streaming server with time-aligned text: towards a distributed international language museum using EOPAS, the EthnoER online presentation and annotation system. This project provides an open-source framework for delivery of media in an application addressing the problem of how to make language data more generally available than it currently is.

Language documentation

Linguistics at the University of Melbourne has a long tradition of supporting fieldwork-based research on endangered languages. Topics range from descriptive grammars of little known languages to more specific investigations of phonetics, morphology, semantics, discourse, lexicography, language acquisition and language documentation.

PARADISEC offers a facility for digital conservation and access to endangered materials from all over the world. Our research group has developed models to ensure that the archive can provide access to interested communities and conforms to emerging international standards for digital archiving. A primary motivation for this project is making field recordings available to those recorded and their descendants. More information can be found on the PARADISEC website.